August 13, 2003

HERE, INDUSTRY. THERE, VICE

The Sydney Morning Herald supports liberalised censorship and drug laws in Australia. But now that Iraqis are drinking, taking drugs, and watching porn -- not for nothing did our man in Najaf call for “democracy, whiskey, and sexy!” -- well, these are bad things. Paul McGeough, in Baptist minister mode, reports:

It is 10am and the crowd is pouring into the seedy Al Najah cinema on Baghdad's Al Rasheed Street. They come, at 70 cents a ticket, for sex on a loop - fleshy scenes from a dozen B-grade movies spliced into a single program, for which there is standing room only.

In Sadoun Street the midday temperature is 50 degrees and the prostitutes tout for business from the shade of a beach umbrella. Further along, in Fidros Square - where US troops stage-managed the demolition of a statue of Saddam Hussein on April 9 - as many as 30 teenagers are sniffing glue and paint thinner.

Whoa, whoa, whoa ... stage-managed? And as for the glue-huffin’ kids, well, such hobbies were likely commonplace before Saddam’s fall. Unless he controlled glue sales.

Drug dealers in the treacherous Bab al Sharqi markets, just off central Tahrir Square, are doing a brisk trade in looted prescription drugs.

The biggest demand is for mind-altering, and addictive, medications. Each trader has a special, half-hidden box for what he calls feel good capsules and tablets - the Herald came away with a multi-coloured cocktail of 200 pills for less than $10.

It’s possibly a stretch to describe these drugs as addictive if you don’t, in fact, know what they are.

At the other end of the day hundreds of street drinkers converge on the banks of the Tigris River, openly selling and drinking gin, arak and beer in a raucous celebration of the ending of Saddam's rigid control of vice.

Under Saddam, alcohol, drugs, pornography and prostitution were state-controlled for the pleasure of a few. But in the post-war vacuum vice has exploded and the likes of Majid Al Sa'adi's tea house, just back from the bustle of Sadoun Street, has become a one-stop shop.

There was a doco on SBS titled Operation Saddam on July 29 which made the claim that the statue demolition was designed by a PR company for the Pentagon. It may not be true, but McGeogh is not making it up out of thin air.

In any case I don't see why you should be suprised. The US military spends millions on PR, and it's not like US soldiers are in the habit of pulling down statues on a whim- they have to be ordered to do so by their superiors, as is the case with most stuff in the Army.

As far as the Herald's double standards go, the article seemed fairly non-judgemental to me. Surely this is a matter for some concern: if conservative religious Iraqis associate this decline in public morality with the occupation, then it's not a good thing from the "winning hearts and minds" perspective. And I hardly think that advocating liberalised drug laws is quite the same as endorsing the sale of "looted prescription drugs" on street corners. And since when in Australia is it legal for stuff like "hundreds of street drinkers ... openly selling and drinking", say on the banks of the Yarra?

In general this is just further evidence of the breakdown in law & order which has been a problem for the last couple of months- and which will have to be solved to get the country back on its feet- which is what we all want, right?

Yet another non-argument. Tim and his buddies are still equating anarchy with freedom. Our society has stable governance and a rule of law, things yet to be seen in post-war Iraq. It is also ridiculous to infer that Paul approves of the "sex-industry" just because he works for a paper that uses non-judgemental terminology. To Tim and friends, I suggest that you put your efforts into genuine debate rather than childish ideological point-scoring.

Paul McGeough and the Sydney Morning Herald obviously believes that the wogs can't handle the good stuff, unlike the elites at the newspaper and among its readers. Ah, what happened to multi-culturalism?